Despite the horrible experiences she has in a marriage training class - where she is trained to protect her husband from her impurity by using the mikvah (a public bath, which ends up giving her shingles) - she can't help dreaming that the relationship will bring friendship, romance and love into her lonely life. She is barely 17 when her aunt arranges her marriage to a young man she meets only twice before the wedding day. As she becomes a reader and then a writer, Feldman reinvents herself as a human being. "If I speak and read it too much, my soul will become tarnished." Unbowed, she sneaks to the Jewish bookstore and to the public library, where she devours "The Chosen," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," "Matilda," " Harry Potter" and "Jane Eyre." These books nourish her spirit and put in her hands the liberatory power of storytelling. "Zeidy says the English language acts like slow poison to the soul," she writes. By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.Īs if she were growing up in a shtetl centuries earlier, Feldman's Williamsburg childhood is devoid of serious education and filled with indoctrination about the sinfulness of the female body, secular life and even the English language.
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